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quinta-feira, 6 de junho de 2013

Gordon
S. Wood, Historian of the American Revolution

By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER

THE
IDEA OF AMERICA

Reflections on the Birth of the
United States

By Gordon S. Wood

385 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95.

Gordon S. Wood is
more than an American historian. He is almost an American institution. Of all
the many teachers and writers of history in this Republic, few are held in such
high esteem. Part of his reputation rises from his productivity — a stream of
books, monographs, articles, lectures and commentary. Now he has added “The
Idea of America” (along with a new edition of John Adams’s Revolutionary
writings in two volumes for the Library of America series).

More important than
his productivity is the quality of his work, and its broad appeal to readers of
the right, left and center — a rare and happy combination. Specially striking
is Wood’s rapport with the young. In the film “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon
and Ben Affleck centered a lively scene at a student hangout on an impassioned
discussion of Wood’s work. The television sitcom “It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia” made “Gordon Wood” into an adjective, and used it as a synonym
for serious scholarship in general. “Wicked awesome,” one character said, “all
that Gordon Wood business!” Through it all, the man himself preserves a quiet
modesty, and even a humility that is central to his work. He is respected not
only for what he does but for who he is.

Wood’s latest book
is a collection of 11 essays, along with an introduction and conclusion, that
encompass his entire career. It reveals more of the author than any of his
other work and creates the opportunity for an overall assessment of his
achievement. Wood introduces himself with a familiar line from the poet
Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
He celebrates the foxes who flourish in his field, and adds in his modest way,
“By contrast, as a historian I fear I am a simple hedgehog. . . . Nearly all of
my publications have dealt with the American Revolution and its consequences.”

That one subject
has occupied Wood for half a century — a concentration span that few can match.
And after many years of labor in that field, he has transformed it. Scholars
before Wood had offered many interpretations of the Revolution, but none seemed
quite right to him. He concentrated his work on the years from 1776 to 1828, an
unusual choice. When he began, Wood remembers, this period had “a reputation
for dreariness and insignificance,” as “the most boring part of American history
to study and teach.” Historians of early America tended to think of the
Revolution as a colonial insurgency and lost interest after 1776. Scholars of
the “middle period” believed that the real revolution happened in the Age of
Jackson, and thought of the preceding years merely as prologue.

Progressives like
Charles Beard and Carl Becker had tried to bring life to the history of the
early Republic by writing about a transition from aristocracy to democracy, but
Wood did not share what he called “their preoccupation with economic and other
underlying interests.” He also disliked “the partiality that plagued their
histories, a partiality that was prompted by the need to find antecedents for
the divisions of their own time.”

Even less
satisfactory to Wood was the scholarship of the mid-1950s. It was a time when
liberals followed Tocqueville’s idea that America was born free without having
to become so. Conservatives took up the argument of Edmund Burke (and John
Quincy Adams) that the purpose of the American Revolution was not to promote
social change, but to prevent it. Radicals compared the Revolution with the
French and Russian Revolutions, and proclaimed that it was not a genuine
revolution at all.

Wood rejected all
of these approaches. He went deep into primary materials and made an
open-minded effort to understand the language and thought of 18th-century
Americans in their own terms. After 10 years of research he reported his
results, first in a short essay reprinted in this collection, then in the 1969
book “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.” Leading his readers
into the ­sources, Wood demonstrated that Americans in those years invented
“not simply new forms of government, but an entirely new conception of
politics.” They rejected ancient and medieval ideas of a polity as a set of
orders or estates. In their place they created a model of a state that existed
to represent individual interests, and to protect individual rights. To those
ends, Americans invented radically new ideas of representation, and new models
for the “parceling of power.”

Wood also made
another discovery: This revolutionary way of thinking did not derive from small
elites or large treatises. He wrote that it was “not delineated in a single
book; it was peculiarly the product of a democratic society.” In newspapers and
pamphlets he found evidence that Americans of all conditions joined this great
debate — men like William Findley, a weaver and farmer in Pennsylvania, and
William Thompson, a tavern keeper in South Carolina.

To all this, Wood
added a third finding. From the start, this new way of thinking was consciously
conceived as an open process. Wood quoted Samuel Williams, a country clergyman
in Vermont, who observed in 1794 that the American system “contains within itself
the means of its own improvement.” It created a process of permanent reform
that proved more durable than Trotsky’s permanent revolution.

“The Creation of
the American Republic, 1776-1787” was much admired for its craftsmanship and
for its substantive contribution. It won both the Bancroft and John H. Dunning
Prizes. But Wood did not rest on his laurels. In 1969 he also published a small
book on the founders’ complex and highly creative thinking about political
representation — a pivotal problem in the American Revolution. Other short
pieces followed, and many appear together for the first time in this new
volume. One essay included here, originally presented as a lecture in 1974 on
democracy and voting in the new Republic, reversed the customary wisdom on that
subject. Wood found that “it is not suffrage that gives life to democracy; it
is our democratic society that gives life to suffrage.” That theme has
important implications in our own world. Other essays in this book take up
problems on constitutions and constitutionalism, democracies and republics,
political power and human rights, always in Wood’s careful and very creative
way.

In 1992 these small
essays led to another big book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.”
Here Wood enlarged his earlier idea of a political thought-­revolution, circa
1776-87, into a model of a sweeping social revolution from 1760 to 1825. He
argued that this transformation “was as radical and social as any revolution in
history, but it was radical and social in a very special 18th-century sense.”
Wood wrote that “one class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant
the rich. But social relationships — the way people were connected one to
another — were changed, and decisively so.” The book altered the way historians
thought about their field. It won a Pulitzer Prize for history.

In the 1990s, Wood
followed it with another wave of small studies on the large figures who
dominate our memory of the Revolution. Several of these essays appear in this
volume. A piece on Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine rescues them from “some very
brutal and often deserved bashing” by exploring an idea of humanity that these
very different men shared. Another empathetic essay studies Alexander Hamilton
and George Washington on the problem of monarchy in the new Republic.

Wood published many
other articles on the founders in 2006, in a lively collection called
“Revolutionary Characters.” He added a separate volume on Benjamin Franklin,
the most complicated founder of them all. Always, Wood’s purpose was not to
celebrate or condemn these leaders, but to understand them. His results lead us
beyond the hagiographers who celebrate the founders as demigods, and
iconoclasts who revile them as racists and sexists, an approach Wood believes to
be inaccurate and anachronistic.

Wood expanded the
scale of his inquiries yet again in 2009 in another big book, “Empire of
Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815,” a volume in the excellent
Oxford History of the United States. Here he links his earlier themes to an
even larger transformation of an entire culture in its deepest values and
purposes. This year he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. Altogether,
Wood has done more than anyone to make the era of the Revolution and early Republic
into one of the liveliest periods in American history.

His work has made a
difference in one more way. It reinforced the center when it was under heavy
attack from both extremes. In a gentle reproof to scholars on the left, Wood
has offered evidence that “what is extraordinary about the American Revolution
is not . . . the continual deprivation and repression of the mass of ordinary
people, but rather their release and liberation.” To conservatives on the right
he makes very clear that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were conceived by
their framers in dynamic terms, and were intended to grow.

In all of this
work, the strength of Wood’s scholarship derives from qualities of caution,
balance and restraint that are uniquely his own. He avoids questions that
cannot be answered by research, even questions of causation that engage most of
his colleagues. Wood writes that “it is difficult, if not impossible, to apply
the physical notion of ‘cause’ to human action.” He is mistaken here; other
causal ideas go far beyond that physical model. But Wood’s approach is
fundamental to his success. As a historian he asks not why people do things,
but what they think they are doing, and how their thoughts have changed through
time. Ideas are studied not as underlying motives for action, but in another
way. Wood believes that “ideas and language give meaning to our actions, and
there is almost nothing that we humans do to which we do not attribute
meaning.”

And on the “lessons
of the past,” Wood is even more restrained. In his new book he observes: “If
the study of history teaches anything, it teaches us the limitations of life.
It ought to produce prudence and humility.” Gordon Wood teaches that lesson by
the strength of his own example.

David Hackett Fischer teaches history at
Brandeis University. He is the author of “Champlain’s Dream” and the
forthcoming “Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand
and the United States.”

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